Sunday, March 24, 2013

This documentary does not have quite the scope of Precious Knowledge, which captured the banning of Tucson High School's Mexican American Studies program as it was happening, although this shorter doc does interview some of the key participants. One of my past students Crystal also happens to be one of the students who is interviewed.

Friday, March 22, 2013

Before my father died, he had been working on a novella length piece of fiction that took place during the late 50s/early 60s in Southern California. Some time back, I revisited it and cut down one of the story-lines to a short piece dealing with a father and son. The son loves playing baseball in Southern California with his friends, but his father can't get past his romantic view of Mexico.

I described the process of revising, and adding and subtracting sentences as arguing with my father's ghost about the craft of fiction.I had first read the piece in its entirety after he had passed in 2006, so it was a good opportunity to revisit the messages and images captured in the writing. When I got around to submitting it, I had listed the author bio as the following:

Julian Medina grew up in El Monte California, was the first
in his family to graduate from college and taught English at Mt.
San Antonio community colleges before dying of a heart attack in 2006. He had
two sons, Zeferino and Cruz Medina.

Followed by my bio on the website. Unfortunately, only my bio is listed on the website, but I'm glad that this story has nonetheless been able to continue.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

On Friday morning, I saw Henry Giroux speak as a featured speaker at the CCC 2013. I regret not taking close notes although I posted the picture below on Twitter and I received a message back from former Tucson Ethnic Studies teacher Curtis Acosta. Acosta asked me to send abrazos in thanks to Giroux for the piece he wrote on the Tucson Ethnic Studies MAS program. So after Giroux finished his lecture, I took the moment to pass along the message of thanks. He smiled and said that he loved that piece.

FRIDAY, MARCH 15: 9:30-10:45 a.m.Chair: Donald Lazere, Cal Poly State Univer
This
session will examine how the ideal of higher education as a public
good is losing its claim to legitimacy in a society that increasingly
defines market interests as the sole measure of individual and social
value and teaching largely as a measurable and instrumental task.
Against this view of higher education as an adjunct of business culture,
this talk argues for educators to take on the role of public
intellectuals willing to engage in creating a formative culture of
learning capable of nurturing the capacities to defend higher education
as a public good crucial to sustaining a critical citizenry and a
democratic society. In the current historical moment, higher education
as a democratic public good faces a crisis of enormous proportions. At
the center of this crisis, particularly in the United States, is a
tension between democratic values and market values, between dialogic
engagement and a creeping authoritarianism. Faith in social
amelioration and a sustainable future appears to be in short supply as
market fundamentalism performs the dual task of using education almost
exclusively to train workers for service sector jobs and produce life
long consumers. This talk will examine the responsibility of academics
in dark times, and what it might mean for scholars not only to redefine
the meaning of higher education as a public value, but also the promise
of academics and critical pedagogy as crucial to developing the
formative culture that make a democracy possible. Central to such a
challenge is the necessity to define intellectual practice “as part of
an intricate web of morality, rigor and responsibility” that enables
academics to speak with conviction, enter the public sphere in order to
address important social problems, and demonstrate alternative models
for what it means to bridge the gap between higher education and the
broader society. This is a notion of intellectual practice that refuses
both the narrow instrumentality and privileged isolation of the
academy, while affirming a broader vision of learning that links
knowledge to the power of self-definition and the critical capacities of
administrators, academics, and students to expand the scope of
democratic freedoms, particularly as they address the crisis of higher
education as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself .

Henry Giroux is Global Television Network Chair In Communication Studies
and
a member of the English and Cultural Studies Dept.at McMaster
University in Hamilton, Ontario. A prolific author, Professor Giroux
has been an extremely articulate and passionate advocate for progressive
education and has mounted a spirited defense of public education in a
time of intense privatization.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

For a few weeks I've heard some mention of Vine, a free app for Apple and Android. It's been described as a moving-instragram of sorts. Users touch the screen to catch video images that add up to 6 seconds and play in a GIF-like loop.

I launched a preemptive apology to my Twitter follows that I would no doubt be posting short Vine videos ranging from toddler action sequences to Tucson Book Festival footage and CCCC 2013.
Tuscon Festival of Books Vines:

Of the course the question for educators will no doubt become: how can I use this in the classroom? Or does this have a pedagogical application? For starters, I could see it as a place to show quick steps for a process-oriented assignment, although 6 seconds comes and goes a bit quick for a substantial communication of information--it might work for repeating an assignment or adding a quick message, though I'm not sure if it would replace Twitter for messaging.